Wishes in Three
by Silberias
Summary: Three wishes, between Jareth and Sarah.
1. Names and Studies

Sarah Williams made her first wish (since visiting the Labyrinth) on the eve of a particularly vicious final exam during her first year of college, and she needed time to study _as well as,_ write a paper—it was for a class she barely had the credit requirement for, and although fascinating, was tremendously stressful. It was a wish that most people would call wishful thinking but Sarah genuinely hoped her wish would be fulfilled.

"I wish that the Goblin King would re-order time so that I had enough time to finish this paper!"

One explosion of glittering magic that smelled like a basket full of spices later, and Sarah was negotiating with said Goblin King—about what she would need to give him in return. In the past three years Sarah had learned and practiced the exchanging of favors—I'll wash the dishes for you, Toby, if you rake the leaves for me—and had realized that the Goblin King was all about that sort of responsibility.

As well as standing up and admitting it when things were tough—honesty—which is why, she had figured out, she'd had the Cleaners sent after her.

"You'll call me by my name, Sarah, that's my wish."

"Is that all?" Sarah was shocked—she had thought that she would be giving up her first-born or something to him, but that was mostly because she had no idea what he would value her wish at. His odd blue eyes looked back at her, luminous in the afternoon sun streaming through the window—

"My…_wish_…for that, in my mind is comparable to your desire to pass this class with flying colors. Both your want and my want have about the same weight, Precious—you will live and continue on if you don't get this wish, and I will get over it if I don't get mine." His eyes, despite his reassuring voice, said that what's said is said, and that he could ask for much more than this.

"Thank you, then, Jareth," Sarah said, mouth curving into a smile as she shook his hand.


	2. Sleeping and Parties

Sarah made her second post-Labyrinth wish when a graduation party went sour a few years later. One of her friends was hosting it, so anything the drunkards broke while milling around the house wasn't hers to replace, but the problem was the drunkards—one of whom thought that she should come outside with him and his friend. The two men were getting more and more insistent with her, and Sarah was left with no wing-woman and no other options.

"I wish Jareth would make you leave me alone!"

He was far more subtle in appearing this time, but that was probably because she was around a lot of other people—he must have appeared somewhere else in the house, from a closet or something. But there he was, steadily making his way through the weaving crowd towards her with his eyes fixed on the two men who wanted her to accompany them.

The quieter friend had gone so far as to reach for her arm to drag her out when Jareth interposed himself between them. Sarah stood behind him, admiring the cut of the white shirt he wore while he dealt with her problem. She wouldn't have wished for his help if she thought she could deal with it alone—but her friend Denise had left early, and her other friend Liz was utterly wasted, and neither of them could back her up against these pushy men.

She wouldn't know, until even the day she died, what Jareth had done to them—but very suddenly his arm was snaked around her waist and her left hand was caught up by his, and they were heading out of the house. Sarah didn't have a car (Denise had a car, but she had ditched), but didn't bother worrying. Either Jareth would walk with her the entire way back to her apartment, or he would just magick them there—the latter of which he did, because he was uncomfortable with her spending so long a time out in the cold night.

As she got her bearings in her house (magicking about the place was damn useful, but also damn disorienting), Sarah pondered what Jareth would consider an equivalent to her wish.

"Jareth?"

"Hmm?"

"Don't you have a wish?" Sarah was genuinely curious—she wasn't anxious for him to leave her presence right now because she was still a little jittery, so she didn't want him to feel like she was chasing him off. As the only sober person she knew right now, Jareth was good company.

He laughed softly, looking at the carpet of the apartment with eyes that glittered happily at each coffee stain or scuff—the cause of his goblins no doubt, and probably something he knew a lot about then. When his eyes flicked up to hers the glitter dimmed slightly, but didn't vanish.

"It's not often that my wishes are granted, Sarah, this is a sincere oddity in my life. I…I believe that…I wish that I could sleep here in your home with you, my dear Sarah." Sarah initially smiled, it was a nice wish, but then lost that smile quickly as she realized he was going to be too tall for her couch. Before Jareth's expression could change a whit, however, she had a plan.

"Okay, you can have my bed and I'll take the cou—" a touch of a gloved Jareth-finger to her nose stopped her however. A gloved Jareth-hand settled on her shoulder and turned her about, and then two gloved Jareth-hands pushed her towards the bedroom. Jareth went around her and sat on the bed, tugging his boots off determinedly. Sarah stood in awe and alarm at what he was doing until he finished de-shoeing himself—after which he promptly made himself comfortable on one half of the bed.

"What _are_ you doing?"

"I'm going to go to sleep, right here, and you're going to go to sleep right here," he said, gesturing to where he was and where she was supposed to be, "and then my wish will be fulfilled. I will however promise to stay strictly on my side unless it's requested otherwise."

With a muttered sarcastic "typical," Sarah nodded and went to go brush her teeth. When she returned it almost looked as though Jareth hadn't even moved a muscle since she'd left—the only change being that his head was resting on the pillow. Sarah wondered how bad of a bed head he would have in the morning.

Only when she had settled into bed with the strange Jareth-shaped weight next to her did Jareth's voice come softly through the darkness.

"I know that I…that I promised you, Sarah…but could I hold you?" In response Sarah reached blindly into the darkness (which he could probably see perfectly through) and found his shoulder. He didn't exactly grab for her after that, but he did quickly wrap his arms around her. Sarah held back sleepy tears as she pitied him for falling in love with her when she had been too young to know what she had—to see through the tricks which he hid his nature in.

She didn't think to worry that as she set the bar higher for her next wish—whatever that may be—he would be setting his responding wish to a corresponding height.


	3. The Wish He Couldn't Grant

Sarah's third wish was made the day that Toby was nearly killed in a car crash which killed their father and severely injured Karen. She was sitting in Karen's room, holding the unconscious woman's hand, and crying. After she had run the Labyrinth eight years before, Sarah had made an effort to understand the emotional politics concerning her mother and the woman her father had married—and had come away admiring Karen more out of the two of them.

Karen had the intimidating task of becoming a mother to a child who didn't want her—she had had to deal with Robert's early inability to connect with her for fear she was another Linda, and had had to endure the infighting between her new husband and his daughter.

Karen was a strong woman and for the past eight years, Linda hadn't been Sarah's mother—Karen had. And Sarah's beloved baby brother—even though he was a healthy nine years old now—had nearly been taken from both of them on the same day that Sarah's father had been.

Sarah hadn't emotionally connected with that last fact yet, she was too busy comforting her step-mother (when she was conscious) and worrying whether or not her brother would survive the night.

"I know that you can't wish the dead were living, but I do wish that Karen and Toby live through this night, even if I didn't get to see them ever again…" Sarah murmured as she stroked Karen's hand. When she felt the weight of another hand on her shoulder, Sarah leaned back into it, finding a certain Goblin King there to support her in the void.

"Sarah-mine, that is a very serious wish, with an even more serious clause. I cannot, however grant it," in the moment's pause in Jareth's words, Sarah barely stifled a sob—her Goblin King couldn't do the one thing that she most desperately wanted him to do—"I cannot grant it here. Will you allow me to take your brother and step-mother to the Castle-Beyond-the-Goblin-City?"

Sarah turned her tear-streaked face up, looking at him upside down, and nodded her agreement to him. In the next instant the stark hospital lighting framing his face changed to a soft, natural lighting of sunlight streaming through open windows.

"Now, I must help the healers, Sarah." He took half a step backwards, away from her, before reconsidering—"Sarah, do you want me to make them forget your father?"

Sarah considered, and shook her head. "Forgetting him for the sake of peace over his death would do him an injustice—please let them remember him." Jareth made a move of acknowledgement and then quickly left the room he had taken them to.

Sarah was asleep when he returned, having succumbed to the traumatizing events of the day and giving in to exhaustion. She woke up when he picked her up from where she'd curled up on a wide windowsill, cradling her head against his shoulder. "They are resting now, but I am afraid you can't see them yet."

Still drowsy, Sarah stayed quiet—simply looking up to his face—wondering if he was going to speak about anything else. He didn't seem to be following up on the subject, walking at a light pace so as not to jostle her. Sarah felt like she was floating rather than being carried as Jareth calmly took them through a set of doors into a massive nave whose ceiling stretched upwards past even heaven—clerestory lighting, windows between the main roof and the roof of the aisles, allowed in a startling violet twilight intermixed with greens and blues of the coming night. The sway of Jareth's gait and the pad of his footsteps, combined with the soft lighting were pushing her initial drowsiness into at least a very heavy nap.

"Jareth?" her eyes, drooping to near shut, were fixed on the light. He hmmed his attention to her, not changing the rhythm of his step.

"The light—it's so…" she trailed off, her doze threatening to overcome her. Jareth chuckled before answering, "I will explain when you awake next. "

* * *

So, I am going to be up the rest of the night writing out Jareth's corresponding wish...Although I feel it's pretty obvious what he's going to want. Um. yeah.

Review?


	4. Equal Footing

Okay, so yeah, bunny effed off right after I put up the initial three chapters--only came back last night and stuck around for a little bit today. I did some pretty heavy referencing to As the World Falls Down in this, but that's because it's the origin (in my mind, with the plot, and as I was doing as the bunny told me) of the entire story. No, really. I was listening to the song--well not really, just audiating at work (you're audiating when you've got a song stuck in your head. Some people have it crazy level'd up, like Mozart who could hear entire symphonies or choirs in his head after listening to them) and then the bunny bit.

For non-writers, plot bunnies go for the brainstem and you can't function regularly until they let go. It's just part of how they are. It's that, or in some unusual circumstances they are heavily armed doing a Rambo impersonation. Uh, my bunnies don't normally do that.

*ahem* Enjoy!

* * *

Sarah startled awake many hours later with cool, secure arms wrapped around her as a yellow morning streaked across the room. An open arched window, allowing the scent of recent rain to seep into the room, cut through the wall across the room. Someone's—Jareth's—breath huffed against her hair, the warmth of it momentarily heating her scalp. The heat of it spun, in eddying worls, across the rest of her face. The room was light, stone covered with a wash of warm cream, faint rose accents, and glints of silver, copper, and gold.

The walls lit up in an amazing cacophony of color—and Sarah tensed up as she realized what this was, and what the previous evening had been. _I'll paint you mornings of gold—and spin you Valentine evenings_. That beautiful dusk, the symphony of colors which soothed her heart, she knew what it was now. Her panic increased, and there was a sudden bid to escape his hold, as she recalled he'd never asked for his recompense for saving her family—what would he ask her to do or say?

"Sarah." She'd woken him up, with her sudden acquisition of sharp elbows and apprehensive shoulder-blades. "_Stay._" Her breath hitched in a way which her eyes suspiciously regarded as a precursor to tears. Jareth apparently had the same thought, and an ungloved hand cupped her cheek as he resettled himself around her.

"This—you're going to make me stay aren't you?" _You, you're him. You're the Goblin King. _"I-in return for…" She trailed off when she realized he took no breath to affirm or deny. When she seemed finished with her panic, he did take a breath.

"Sarah, you know that I set my wishes on an equal level compared to yours—You might not think of it this way, but I must: your kingdom is as great, and I have no power over you. But neither do you have power over me. We are equals, Sarah." He paused, expecting something. Sarah couldn't read his expression because they still both reclined on the bed he'd curled them up on. The firmness of his arms around her, of his palm against her cheek, nothing tightened or loosened against her. The morning—made truly golden by the treatment of the room—still flooded in through the window.

"Okay…" It smelled less like fresh rain and more like the taste of apples—there must be a rose bush below the window.

"Let me preface this with the fact that you do not, under any circumstance, need to grant this to me now—just sometime in your lifetime and while you still can. You wished…for your family. And I wish for mine." His form behind her grew tense as he asked, he wished, in either anticipation of her attacking him somehow or with how much it cost him to say it so plainly.

Sarah relaxed against him in response, she was so relieved by his words—his uncanny knowledge of the inner workings of her mind, the ways to reassure and comfort her.

_Just fear me, love me, do as I say…and I—I will be your slave._ When said flippantly, that line was scary—when it was someone who would really do anything for their chosen love, well, the last words became simply _and vice-versa_. He feared her rejection, he loved her entirely, and he did as she said when she said it—and as dysfunctional as that sounded, it made perfect sense to reciprocate completely.

And as Toby had lain in the ICU, perhaps dying perhaps not, and Karen had awoke in dazed panics, as Sarah's world had fallen about her ears—Jareth had been there.

"That sounds just about _fair_, Jareth," she murmured, snuggling into his hold as it tightened against her.

* * *

And after that you can all write fanfiction in your heads for their happy ending, because frankly that's not part of my vision of this story--it's only a vague airy sort of happy ending. And since I can't find more details for that happy ending, y'all aren't going to get more. This is the end of the story as I'm writing it. Jareth and Sarah are together and they're happy. Because that's how fluff is supposed to be. And I hate the necessary epilogue that people do where "And then the swelling belly came between them, and he smiled, and she smiled and WE ALL LOVE EACH OTHER YAY" I hate those. So I won't write one. Not for this. No.

Review?


End file.
